Psychedelic Quotes

I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream. ~ Terence McKenna

Through all of history mankind has ingested psychedelic substances. Those substances exist to put you in touch with spirits beyond yourself, with the creator, with the creative impulse of the planet. ~ Ray Manzarek

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. ~ Sheila Weller

I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself. ~ Terence McKenna

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it. ~ Timothy Leary

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me ~ Pink Floyd

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic experience is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bards of our human civilization. It's a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. ~ Terence McKenna

A great essence of life lies in the distinctive impacts mankind is able to make on earth, notwithstanding the challenges, oppressions and oppositions we face ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. ~ Albert Einstein

The notes sound like they're coming from inside your mind ... It was the closest thing to a psychedelic experience I've ever had. ~ Robin Pecknold

The social consequence of the psychedelic experience is clear thinking -which trickles down as clear speech. Empowered speech. ~ Terence McKenna

The sine qua non for obtaining a psychedelic experience is humbling yourself to the point where you admit that you must submit to the experience of the plant or the drug. This act of surrender is the major technical function you will be called upon to perform during the psychedelic trip. ~ Terence McKenna

If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. ~ Alan W. Watts

I have never tried anything psychedelic, but I've always wanted to. Would I be wrapped up in colors, attacked by sounds, filled with insights about worlds I don't even know exist? ~ Rita Golden Gelman

Psychedelic experiences and dreams are chemical cousins; they are only different in degree. ~ Terence McKenna

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it. ~ Antonin Artaud

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind ~ Timothy Leary

Can we perceive those inorganic beings, don Juan?" I asked. "We certainly can," he replied. "Sorcerers do it at will. Average people do it, but they don't realize that they're doing it because they are not conscious of the existence of a twin world. When they think of a twin world, they enter into all kinds of mental masturbation, but it has never occurred to them that their fantasies have their origin in a subliminal knowledge that all of us have: that we are not alone. ~ Carlos Castaneda

What the psychedelic experience really is, is opening the doorway into a lost continent of the human mind, a continent that we have almost lost all connection to, and the nature of this lost world of the human mind is that it is a Gaian entelechy. ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That's the odd paradox of it. ~ Terence McKenna

The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness. ~ Terence McKenna

All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it's very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you're lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact. ~ Terence McKenna

In an instant, five harlequin-like clowns emerged and began to perform all kinds of acrobatic tricks, encircling us––correction...corralling us. They were graceful but a little creepy too. They were wearing black and white costumes that were form fitting and appeared to move like some psychedelic drug trip when they flipped around. That of course was odd, but not nearly as odd as the chant they were singing as they continued to perform their tricks.
See us dance.
Watch us flip.
Care to take a chance?
We'll only need a sip.
Come to see our mistress?
Or come to see our master?
She can be quite viscous.
But he is a disaster.
We love them both, and we'll let you choose.
Either way, we wouldn't want to be in your shoes. ~ Brynn Myers

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate. ~ Terence McKenna

New Rule: Stop putting psychedelic screensavers on computers. I sit down to check my e-mail, and the next thing I know it's three days later, I'm in the desert, I'm banging on a drum, I'm naked, and somebody's pierced my dick. ~ Bill Maher

The use of drugs like mescaline may serve an appropriate purpose. Indeed, "Psychedelic" drugs have been widely used in the spiritual traditions of the world, including the Yoga of Patanjali, though they were never advertised as ultimate keys to enlightenment, merely as stepping-stones on the spiritual path. ~ Georg Feuerstein

I'm influenced by the music of the '60s. It's a mishmash of everything. To me, psychedelic can be all the way to a DJ. House music can be very psychedelic. Flying Lotus is very psychedelic. Even though it's urban and technological, it's also mind-expanding, anything-can-go mishmash. ~ Anton Newcombe

I don't know if you realize this, but there are some researchers - doctors - who are giving this kind of drug to volunteers, to see what the effects are, and they're doing it the proper scientific way, in clean white hospital rooms, away from trees and flowers and the wind, and they're surprised at how many of the experiments turn sour. They've never taken any sort of psychedelic themselves, needless to say. Their volunteers - they're called 'subjects,' of course - are given mescaline or LSD and they're all opened up to their surroundings, very sensitive to color and light and other people's emotions, and what are they given to react to? Metal bed-frames and plaster walls, and an occasional white coat carrying a clipboard. Sterility. Most of them say afterward that they'll never do it again. ~ Alexander Shulgin

The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind. ~ Terence McKenna

Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn't find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I'm into heavy duty, psychedelic, foreign music. That's what I like listening to. ~ Action Bronson

The music was intended to replicate or even enhance the mind-altering experiences of the psychedelic drugs. They were using electric guitars, wah-wah pedals, loop music to create ostinato patterns, electric organs, synthesizers (nobody even had any idea what that was at the time, but it was cool to throw it into a conversation), electro-mechanical polyphonic tape replay keyboards, fuzz box effects, backward tapes, you name it. Anything went ~ Karl Wiggins

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen. ~ Terence McKenna

The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human
being has ever seen before, and no other human being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity. ~ Terence McKenna

Psychedelics are probably responsible for every aspect of human evolution apart from the decline in bodyhair. ~ Terence McKenna

You want a showman, go see rock 'n' roll bands today. You want to have a shamanistic experience, get psychedelic, then you watch The Doors. ~ Ray Manzarek

Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them. ~ Timothy Leary

Every original and innovator doesn't have to have psychedelic hair. There's a cliché version of who's an original. It's always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself. ~ Maxwell King

Psychedelic experiences are beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It's the last nursery, and most people never leave it. ~ Terence McKenna

I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place. ~ Terence McKenna

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new. ~ Jerry Saltz

Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip. Retro, Norm had explained earlier, was cresting, and he was catching the wave by wearing a psychedelic poncho, fatigue pants, love beads, and an earring with a dangling peace sign. Groovy, man. His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair newly curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell. Che ~ Harlan Coben

The way out then is personal responsibility, new operating systems downloaded from outside of culture, which means from the deeper wisdom of the psychedelic plants and then a commitment to community and a motto of "To the future, without fear!" Without fear! ~ Terence McKenna

It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171). ~ Patti Smith

I'm on a bus on a psychedelic trip reading murder books tryin' to stay hip. ~ Billy Idol

I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously. ~ Terence McKenna

Psychedelic telepathy is you 'see' what I mean. ~ Terence McKenna

The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without first-expierience is a fool and a fraud. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available. ~ Terence McKenna

What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things. ~ Terence McKenna

Psychedelics show you what's in and on your mind, those subconscious thoughts and feelings that are are hidden, covered up, forgotten, out of sight, maybe even completely unexpected, but nevertheless imminently present. Depending upon set and setting, the same drug, at the same dose, can cause vastly different responses in the same person. One day, very little happens; another day, you soar, full of ecstatic and insightful discoveries; the next, you struggle through a terrifying nightmare. The generic nature of psychedelic, a term wide open to interpretation, suits these effects. ~ Rick Strassman

Life is an ecstasy. Life is sweet as nitrous oxide. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those of us who are working with these strange substances trying to find the best way of using them, both in the treatment of illnesses and for the exploration of the human mind, need men like Bishop to come forward and explain that our purposes are serious and good, to emphasize that this is not a diversion, an amusement or an attempt to relieve people of their spare cash.

-Robert Dickins ~ Cameron Adams

Nothing is as boundary dissolving, except for psychedelic compounds, as travel. Travel is up there. ~ Terence McKenna

The potential of the psychedelic drugs to provide access to the interior universe, is, I believe, their most valuable property. ~ Alexander Shulgin

This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human. ~ Terence McKenna

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. ~ Terence McKenna

This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he'd seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who'd dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc Knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen.
Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
'Gee,' he said to himself out loud, 'I dunno... ~ Thomas Pynchon

I think of going to the Grave without having a Psychedelic Experience is like going to the Grave without ever having Sex. It means that you never Figured out what it is all about. The Mystery is in the Body and the way the Body Works itself into Nature. ~ Terence McKenna

I mean people have compared us to like the Grateful Dead and all these like psychedelic sixties bands. ~ Jon Fishman

Anyone who grew up in the psychedelic '60s probably experienced their share of hypnagogic fireworks. Just as sex got me hooked on anatomy, so drugs were probably what first got me interested in entoptic phenomena, phosphenes, and hypnagogic imagery. ~ Peter Blegvad

Neuroscientist David Comings drew out the larger implications of such hallucinations for the relationship between our rational and spiritual brains:
The psychedelic drugs like DMT often produce a sensation of "contact," of being in the presence of and interaction with a non-human being. Highly intelligent and sophisticated test subjects who knew these feelings were drug-induced nevertheless insisted the contact had really happened. The temporal lobe-limbic system's emotional tape recorder sometimes cannot distinguish between externally generated real events and internally generated non-real experience thus providing a system in which the rational brain and the spiritual brain are not necessarily in conflict. ~ Michael Shermer

That's why I always recommend a psychedelic experience because it makes you realize that all you've learned is in fact just learned and not necessarily the truth. ~ Bill Hicks

Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket without a guidance system. One might wind up somewhere worth going, and, depending on the compound and one's "set and setting," certain trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis. ~ Sam Harris

Reality, as you currently experience it, is something like a waking dream. It is disguising deeper and more intensified levels of being and knowing. For those who are ready and willing, the doors to those other levels now stand open. ~ Daniel Pinchbeck

I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination. ~ Terence McKenna

[B]y banning psychedelic research we have not only given up the study of an interesting drug or group of substances, but also abandoned one of the most promising approaches to the understanding of the human mind and consciousness. ~ Stanislav Grof

The renaissance of interest in Eastern spiritual philosophies, various mystical traditions, meditation, ancient and aboriginal wisdom, as well as the widespread psychedelic experimentation during the stormy 1960s, made it absolutely clear that a comprehensive and cross-culturally valid psychology had to include observations from such areas as mystical states; cosmic consciousness; psychedelic experiences; trance phenomena; creativity; and religious, artistic, and scientific inspiration. ~ Stanislav Grof

I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they're about time, and they somehow make all time co-present. ~ Terence McKenna

A lot of people trash their subtle physical body with psychedelic drugs. While they do certainly give you experiences in altered levels of attention, you pay a price for it. They definitely screw up the subtle physical. Hatha Yoga can be good for that. ~ Frederick Lenz

In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. ~ Terence McKenna

Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena. ~ Terence McKenna

Ritual use of psychedelic plants and substances has been a particularly effective technology for inducing holotropic states of consciousness. ~ Stanislav Grof

No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The psychedelic mind is a higher dimensional mind, it is not fit for three dimensional space time. ~ Terence McKenna

Psy Free was a trio consisting of guitar, organ and drums. I was the drummer. We did what the name suggests: psychedelic, free music. ~ Klaus Schulze

'Drugs' and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position. ~ Terence McKenna

My first psychedelic experience with Aldous still directs my life today. ~ Laura Huxley

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. ~ Germaine Greer

Well neither of us were "Buddhists" then because it was new to us. We were 60's people. Psychedelic relics, you know ... whatever, right on, radicals and world changers, social peaceniks perhaps, with a Buddhist spiritual veneer. ~ Surya Das

Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool. Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place, psychologically. Know what you're using, decide just why you're using it, and you can have a rich experience. They're not addictive, and they're certainly not escapist, either, but they're exceptionally valuable tools for understanding the human mind, and how it works. ~ Alexander Shulgin

As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions. ~ Stanislav Grof

Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort. ~ Terence McKenna

I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn't abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life. ~ Laura Smith

When you reunite with your soul, everything that you think changes and all of the pain goes away. ~ Gerard Armond Powell

Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego. ~ Terence McKenna

You are one with the same force that provides the spiral arms of the galaxy. That universal creativity. It's also what you are as well. And when the mystic eye is open and sees that, a person is forever changed ! ~ Alex Grey

What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible. ~ Terence McKenna

It's the most psychedelic experience I ever had, going to see Hendrix play. When he started to play, something changed: colors changed, everything changed. ~ Pete Townshend

In a sense, sexuality is the built-in psychedelic experience that only a very few people manage to evade. ~ Terence McKenna

The idea of psychedelic societies is something new. And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug. It merely means that the complexity and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant. ~ Terence McKenna

LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us. ~ Terence McKenna

Neither knew how long they kissed, neither cared. It was difficult to say which one held up the other; both were balanced against each other, as they fell into an abyss filled with psychedelic colors, shooting stars, and the pounding of one heart. ~ Tallulah Grace

Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work. ~ Terence McKenna

I always wanted to make a cover album consisting of obscure psychedelic music from the 1960s - all re-shaped and customized, Ulver style. ~ Kristoffer Rygg

Nobody can have your psychedelic experience for you; you just have to screw your courage up and raise the cup to your lips or smoke the pipe or whatever it is and face what's in there. ~ Dennis McKenna

The brain is the key, the brain is the source, the brain is God. Everything that humans do is neuroecology. ~ Timothy Leary

Geometric and psychedelic shapes, mosaics, and mandalas...There is a certain calm in the chaos that most folks don't see" -Claudia ~ Tiffany D. Jackson